MacDowell Colony

The MacDowell women have a surefire recipe for success: Grow up far from the spotlight, then land in Hollywood just as the skin starts to glow. The formula worked for Andie. Now the next generation, her daughters Rainey and Margaret, are poised for their own grand entrance.

Andie MacDowell has a fantasy. It came to her during a L'Oréal shoot. She's been the spokesperson for them — for L'Oréal, that is, not fantasies, although that's often a distinction without a difference — for 27 years, since she was 27, three years before she was cast as the lead in Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Fantasies are something of a professional specialty. She has noticed that many photographers long to be directors, and they like it that "a lot of the times in photographs I'm doing something completely different in my mind." When that happens, she says, pictures in a magazine capture a moment instead of just recording a pose.

Over chai tea at Café Vardo, a Gypsy/vegetarian coffee shop and bar next to her favorite yoga place in Venice, California, MacDowell confirms qualities she has always brought to movies. Her manner is composed, her posture high in the saddle, and she combats any impression of aloofness this might leave with waves of genteel chattiness. Her eyes are not afraid of contact; it probably says "brown" on her license, but the color is closer to blood orange, enhanced today by smoky eye shadow and the occasional squint against the L.A. glare. In L'Oréal hair color commercials, MacDowell's hair is invariably straight, long, and impossibly liquid, but in real life it's thick and ringlety, and sometimes as she talks a lock of it falls across her face and over those eyes. The look is Salome, plus product.

The fantasy under discussion all began, she tells me, this spring with a L'Oréal stylist, or really with the clothes he was dressing her in for the shoot that day. For one look he gave her a bra and a pair of heels and a loose shirt MacDowell called "kind of sexy." Since MacDowell, a native of Gaffney, South Carolina, cultivates a Dixie tendency toward euphemism and understatement, it's probably safe to say the outfit looked blatantly lascivious. Except for the café waitress and a couple speaking German in the corner, we're the only people in the place, so she reenacts the scene.

"Okay, darling," the stylist said.

"This is it?"

"That's it."

"Are you kidding me? This is what I'm wearing?"

She proceeds to pose on a stool the way she did that day in Paris: back arched, legs spread, arms out, more Bond Girl than Southern Belle.

And what exactly was she doing in her mind at that point? "In my fantasy" — and since she is a movie star, it turned almost immediately into a movie pitch — "I would get into elevators, those old-fashioned, really beautiful ones in Paris, and start hitting on men — any man that I could get in the elevator alone with. It didn't matter what they looked like or how old they were. In some sort of sensual way I would hit on them. But only as long as they were in the elevator. And as soon as the doors would open, it would be over." The movie in her head was European and feature-length, like something Charlotte Rampling, one of her heroes, might do. But then she recounted it to Erica Dasher, her co-star in Jane by Design on ABC Family — MacDowell plays Gray Chandler Murray, the Miranda Priestley–like boss of the teenage title character, played by Dasher — and the 24-year-old wanted to turn it into a short. MacDowell laughs at the difference in the younger woman's fantasy. "Anyway, I think the look must have been too risqué to put in the commercial," she confides, delighted, even months later visibly revivified by the fact that they were dressing her, a woman of 54, in such a sexy way. "I'm so shocked when a fashion director feels comfortable making me look like that. I actually thought it was a blast."

MacDowell has become a philosopher of both sex and the lack of it lately. She's twice divorced, first in 1999, after a 13-year marriage to former model Paul Qualley, the father of her three children, Justin, Rainey, and Margaret, all born in the late '80s and early '90s, during the peak of her box office marketability. She was divorced again in 2004, after a three-year stint with Rhett Hartzog, a former secret admirer and hometown friend. And she is not dating now, she explains in an unremarkable tone, the way you might say, "I just flew in from Montana" (as she did the night before; she spent the weekend there with the 25-year-old Justin at their 3,000-acre working ranch outside Missoula). All these experiences help account for her current informed take on romantic futility.

"I think there is sexy," MacDowell says as we're talking about clothes, and also about aging and mortality. "And then there's tacky sexy. When you're young, you can get away with tacky sexy. I mean, it's not even tacky when you're young. But when you get older, it's just tacky." She laughs. Just now she's wearing a white silk rose-print cheongsam she had made in Shanghai. "It's just such a great shape," she says, standing up for a full turn. "Because, see how it comes in right there?" We contemplate her couture from Sir Mix-a-Lot's preferred angle. "I love them. It was, like, 20 bucks!" Over the cheongsam she's thrown on a bright pink sweater she picked up years ago in a little shop in Paris on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and added a coral-colored Kieselstein-Cord bag. "Have you noticed all the shorts this summer? The slashed, open shorts? What woman my age is going to walk around like that? I went to get my hair colored yesterday, and a woman walked in in a pair of those shorts and high heels with her butt hanging out. And I just thought, Why?" In casual conversation, MacDowell does not police her accent the way she does on camera, so the last word comes out as wah. "Wah would she do that? I guess it makes her happy to walk around with her ass hanging out. I don't know. Not my choice. Especially not my ass right now, I wouldn't."

One thing that doesn't show up in film or print is how competitive and driven she is. After she tells me a story about how, at the age of nine, she talked a local farmer into letting her ride his prize horse through town and over to her grandmother's on the other side of Gaffney, I ask if she was an all-around tomboy or just horse crazy. "Definitely a tomboy," she says instantly. "And fearless in a lot of ways. That's why I'm successful." A few minutes later we're talking about yoga, and I mention that I like Bikram. "Yeah, guys do," she says, admitting that she will indulge in a superheated session if she's fasting or on a cleanse. "I think it's really good for that. But I prefer a more challenging form." She says this sweetly, completely in line with the air of distracted serenity she projects onscreen. But still, there's no mistaking her steeliness and self-confidence, the indispensable qualities that helped her navigate the upper echelons of Hollywood bankability for years. At a level where being a star is big business, Andie MacDowell remains the unapologetic CEO of Andie MacDowell Inc., the one-woman conglomerate that dominated date movies from the first Bush administration through the Clinton era, from Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Green Card to Groundhog Day and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Realistic inventory of company assets is part of that job. "Oh, my skin, it was so amazing, if I say so myself," she says. The wistful tone is unmistakable, but she still apologizes. "It sounds like complete vanity, but if I showed you..." She mentions a weeklong photo shoot with Albert Watson in Kenya for British Vogue back in the '80s, during which she wore nothing in the way of makeup for an entire week. "I was young. What can I say?"

Up on the big screen, the flawless complexion that gets her so much print work comes alive. In her hit movies there's always a breakthrough moment when some French lout or stammering Brit or louche social outlier suddenly appears charming, redeemable, and attractive because he has finally done or said something to make Andie MacDowell blush. As her manager puts it, "She makes her man look good." MacDowell calls it "creating a moment," and she can apparently furnish them at will. In Cedar Cove, a Hallmark Channel movie about a woman who must choose between ambition and her hometown that airs in January, there was no love scene in the script, nothing to show the attraction between the two central characters. "And we had to come up with something," she says. "So we thought about, Where is the moment? And I said, 'Just let me take care of this, okay?' It wasn't sexual. It was romantic. But it is my area."

Her daughters (who, like Justin, go by the surname Qualley) now appear primed to join the family business. Rainey, 23, appeared with Andie (as her rebellious teenage daughter) in Mighty Fine and joined her mother for the film's premiere in Cannes this spring, and Margaret, 17, spent the summer (the last before her senior year in high school) taking scene study at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). Andie has always been protective of her children. (Perhaps this has something to do with her own experience: Her mother, an alcoholic, died at 53 of a heart attack, a fact that sent Andie to the doctor a lot last year, when she too was 53.) She raised her kids far from Hollywood on purpose, first on the ranch in Montana and later in a home in Asheville, North Carolina, which she recently sold. And she was notorious for deleting unnecessary expletives from her dialogue on the chance that her children might spot their mom onscreen someday.

Her daughters start out with certain obvious advantages — they both inherited their mother's skin, for one. But there's not much MacDowell can do to save them from the inevitable rejection every actor must face. She has vivid memories of that period in her own career. There was a long and humiliating stretch when she couldn't land parts — after 1984's Greystoke, when the producers eliminated MacDowell's magnolia drawl entirely and called in Glenn Close to dub all her lines in a plummy English accent. She lost out on Annie Savoy in Bull Durham (to Susan Sarandon) and Babs Rogers Grey in Everybody's All-American (to Jessica Lange). "Directors would say, 'You did a really good job, but we're going to hire a name,'" she remembers.

Rainey, undaunted, is following her mother's blueprint. This fall she's headed to Montana (five hours from the family ranch) to play the lead in an independent film, Falcon Song, in much the way that MacDowell broke the deadlock in her own career by signing on for Steven Soderbergh's first feature. "For a long time my mother wouldn't let me watch her movies, the grown-up ones at least," Rainey says. "It's fun being able to see them now, especially Sex, Lies, since she was pregnant with me at that time. And Green Card, too — I just like seeing her then, because I never knew her when she was younger." Rainey acknowledges that she is now "in the grind," suffering the same indifference. "For the bigger studio films, a lot of times it doesn't really matter how well you audition," she says. "It's much easier to do independent films. But really, I'm happy to be working at all!"

Her younger sister, who is known in the family as Sarah Margaret but goes by just Margaret these days (in part because folks outside the South don't properly pronounce the double moniker as a single word), recently refocused her ambitions along with her name. After a year at the North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem, and a few summers with the American Ballet Theatre and several other highly regarded ballet companies, she was offered an apprenticeship with Patricia McBride at the North Carolina Dance Theatre. The offer made her realize that when it came right down to it, she really wanted to act. Margaret, a model repped by IMG, has already channeled her dancerly resolve into the great challenges of the stage. She prepared Lady MacBeth's "unsex me now" monologue for the start of the RADA program. "I'm sort of introverted, and I wanted to counteract my natural tendencies," she says. As a result of that performance, she was cast as the male lead, the title character, in her class's production of Henry V. "It's fun to be able to explore different sides of yourself," she says amiably.

The three women all call L.A. home now. Margaret lives with her mom in Venice, and Rainey lives in Marina del Rey, a 10-minute bike ride down the beach, with her boyfriend Richard Kohnke (the two met when they were cast as a couple in Mighty Fine). MacDowell has steady work these days on Jane by Design. And if Cedar Cove is picked up as a pilot for a new series, she'll be even busier. But except for when the studios send a car to take her to work, it's a life of walking or maybe biking distance, fulfilling in all regards but one. "I'm in an unusual stage right now," she says, "because I haven't dated in so long. The sense of isolation turns it all into a bigger deal. Just taking the risk of opening that door is really hard for me right now." When she thinks of the solution, she laughs. "Maybe I need to start taking some crazy rides in an elevator in Paris!"

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